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A piece of proprietary software that collects data on basically everything on your machine and is unavailable on Linux? Nice! Surely this has organically risen

A piece of proprietary software that collects data on basically everything on your machine and is unavailable on Linux? Nice! Surely this has organically risen to the front page, unaffected by it's ycombinator backing!

ushakov 4y ago
you are not allowed to criticise Fig here when they appeared here last time, i've written a negative comment about them my comment was then pinned to the bottom of the page by super-mods, even-though it had the first spot with 30 upvotes https://imgur.com/a/Z5AZkik https://imgur.com/a/Z5AZkik dang (HN moderator) has actually confirmed that my comment's ranking was manipulated, but declined to answer any further questions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569
- VMtest 4y ago
  this opens my eyes, TIL some people on HN have the ability to downweight a comment (which is not equivalent to downvoting)
  - ushakov 4y ago
    yes, now you know the game is rigged just imagine how much of the HN comment section is manipulated by these elites i guess some YC-investor isn't happy that us regulars are devaluing his investment and downranks negative comments so that people will give Fig a try after reading bunch of good ones
    - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
      > elites I don't think this is the proper use of the word. These are just people with vested interest in making a product more popular - it has nothing to do with any "elite."
      - ushakov 4y ago
        google: "elites meaning" "a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society." the people who downranked my comments, were indeed elites, because they're a select group of privileged users with the ability to downrank
        fold_left 4y ago
        Elite like a Janitor? because only he can open the Office in the morning?
        ushakov 4y ago
        the power they have is that they can influence opinions millions visit HackerNews every day when those people see Fig ad here, first thing they do is check what the people are saying about it in the comment section now, imagine that instead of real feedback, you're mostly seeing cherry-picked comments praising the product it certainly shapes your opinion of the product and makes you more likely to try
        Brian_K_White 4y ago
        That makes them merely select, like the janitor. People do commonly use elite as a pejorative stand in for select group, but elite still does mean in some way better or superior, and surely you don't mean to say they are superior in any way than position.
        FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
        no elite like owning the building the janitor have some keys to
    - staindk 4y ago
      Just my 2c I don't know why you are 'a regular' if you have such a toxic opinion of and attitude towards HN. Also although this is not going to sway you, I at least want to mention it as I found it interesting when I came across this - see the response and embedded search link in the FAQ question "Are negative stories about YC suppressed on HN?" here [1] Edit: also want to note that I'm thankful for you and others who bring up the privacy issues because I likely would have looked at the fig.io page, thought 'hey this looks cool' and upvoted the post without thinking much further... which is likely where a lot of the upvotes come from. So IMO putting things more lightly (even in your original response 9 days ago) would have sufficed. Perhaps if you had qualified what you meant by fig relying on "free labour" (it just sounds like a hectic accusation) your comment would have stayed at the top. Though overall I agree it doesn't seem like the kind of comment that should have been suppressed and it's good to push back against that a bit. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
      - emerongi 4y ago
        I think I would very much be dissatisfied as well after finding out that someone can arbitrarily devalue my opinions. The original comment by the author wasn't even that negative in my opinion, it just outlined real problems with Fig. Someone didn't like that though and the author got the hammer for it.
        theturtletalks 4y ago
        This is the disconnect. HN wants to come across as a discussion of free ideas that can be voted upon, but some users can down-weight comments to the bottom? That’s well within HN’s prerogative since it was started by YC, but they should be straight forward that YC companies are given preferential treatment. Most lurkers and users think YC companies make it to the front page organically and based on merit alone.
        dang 4y ago
        YC companies are not given preferential treatment, with three exceptions, which are clearly defined in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html): Launch HN posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches https://news.ycombinator.com/launches), job ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs), and alumni usernames being displayed in orange to other alumni. Other than that, YC companies have to compete for attention on HN along with everyone else, and I can tell you that most find it maddeningly difficult. In some ways we use moderation power to YC startups' disadvantage - we moderate criticisms of YC startups less, not more, than usual (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). For example, the tedious angry-generic-repetitive sort of subthread that tends to get upvoted on most common topics is exactly the kind of thing we downweight as part of standard moderation, but we do that less when a YC startup is the topic. That's not because such discussion is any higher-quality in those cases (it isn't), but rather because people are quick to jump to the conclusion that we're doing nefarious things and we need to be able to answer those concerns in good conscience. The fact that there's all this drama about one such subthread having gotten downweighted is actually an indication of how we don't do that. It happened, but only by mistake.
  - dang 4y ago
    We've been doing experiments for many years with the intention of extending moderation abilities to broader segments of the community. Some of these experiments end up getting dropped, while others end up as official features on the site. For example, it used to be that only moderators could unkill a [dead] post and restore it to full visibility. Then we started an experiment in letting non-moderators do that, and this turned into the 'vouch' feature which allows most HN users above a certain karma threshold to have a say in which posts get unkilled. That was the biggest success to date - it has made a big difference both in thread quality (many interesting comments become visible) and community happiness (there's less resentment about posts being dead than there used to be). That was a great outcome, and we're always thinking about more possibilities for such things. The current experiment is very much in the same spirit. Personally I would love to find ways to extend these things to everyone (most likely above a certain karma threshold) but it's not often obvious how to do that. Another example is the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which gives submissions a random placement on HN's front page.
- dewey 4y ago
  > confirmed that my comment's ranking was manipulated Being flagged / downvoted by users isn't "manipulated", that's just how a upvote / downvote based website works. The comment was likely downvoted because it was just plain out wrong as the first comment to your post already says. > YC companies get tips and notifications when they're about to get featured > We don't.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    no, no, no you're missing the point! the comment wasn't flagged and it wasn't downvoted in fact the opposite is true as it has 30 upvotes, upvoted by regular users like you the comment was downranked, so it only appears lower on the page this feature isn't available for regular users, only for an elite group
    - dewey 4y ago
      > you're missing the point! No, the point is that it was downvoted / downranked / flagged because it was a low quality comment that is spreading FUD and it doesn't matter who did it.
      - ushakov 4y ago
        if my comment was so low quality, why did 30 users choose to upvote it? why isn't HN respecting user's opinions and manipulating the positions as they wish?
        ascar 4y ago
        > why isn't HN respecting user's opinions and manipulating the positions as they wish? Because certain comments can be quite agreeable, but don't encourage interesting discussions. Your particular thread had more discussion about bitterness and etiquette than content. Even though your points are valid that's not the kind of discussion one wants to have at the top of any article. Derailing the comment section about this article with your own agenda isn't particularly helpful either. But at least I appreciate that I now know about that feature.
- monkin 4y ago
  All your comments in that thread are negative. I just see an angry and hostile person who’s rocking a boat on a sea of conspiracy. As Dang said in comment you linked: “That's no fun and does nothing for the community.”.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    i'm not denying that i was in angry mood when commenting in the thread but the reason i've got angry is because the original comment i made was moved to the very last position not by downvoting, but by undemocratic rulers of HN the angry comments in thread came after that accident happened
    - stingraycharles 4y ago
      I think it’s very explicit that HN never intends to be a democracy, and one of the techniques it uses is fairly strong moderation.
      - spoils19 4y ago
        So the community espouses the free market of ideas, yet we're supposed to love it's strong moderation?
        Kye 4y ago
        The community is made up of people from all walks of life from everywhere on the planet. It's impossible to speak of it in general terms. No, not everyone wants an ideological free-for-all.
        eleet_hacker 4y ago
      - Brian_K_White 4y ago
        How does that make it ok? Mods moderate, ...and their moderation action caused this flood of negative reaction which wouldn't have been their otherwise. If it's valid to criticise a critic, it must also be valid to criticise a critic critic. The merits of a given argument or action do not rest on "because daddy said so". There is and must be a daddy, but no daddy is above critique themselves even though their job is to moderate others.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  I too, sometimes get into personal fights and push for emotional arguments but nothing good ever comes out of this. I have my HN account downgraded multiple times. Here on HN, we have something absent everywhere else: A moderator who treats you as a person and spends time and energy to explain why something is the way it is. You may not agree with the reasoning all the times but almost everywhere else you don't get the reasoning and only the results(shadow ban, censorship, lock out). Can I offer you something? If you believe that HN is not run fairly, collect the evidence and write a thorough article about it and post it here or on Reddit and other places. If you articulate your ideas properly and if you have a point I bet you will receive traction and response from YC people.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    what's the point? YC owns HackerNews HN is their marketing asset otherwise how is it possible that a niche product of a YC company right now has the first spot with 400 upvotes?
    - chrischen 4y ago
      How does one even disprove your statement? If indeed it organically got upvoted how does one even prove that to you? Your argument against them is posited in way that is impossible to counter. I for one upvoted because this genuinely seemed like an interesting feature. It's clearly hitting a pain point for me as a developer, whether or not it actually ends up solving it satisfactorily.
      - ushakov 4y ago
        oefrha 4y ago
        Now that’s just crossing the line.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- sras-me 4y ago
  Reminds me of the following expression. "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." The problem appear to be people have a high expectation from HN. People think that HN to be a discussion platform. But it is actually a PR platform implemented via a discussion forum. Understand that and you ll have no trouble.
- oefrha 4y ago
  I’m not affiliated with YC in any way, I sometimes mock YC companies, and I can tell you with certainty that a comment can be downranked out of human discretion to the bottom without the involvement of a “super-mod” or anyone affiliated with YC. Not sure if I can disclose further than that. Also, I tried fig the first time round and was not impressed.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    the comment was explicitly downranked by a "super-mod", not downvoted by regular users > Not sure if I can disclose further than that. how hypocrite of you to confirm you know more, but don't want to give out any information why are you confirming then?
    - oefrha 4y ago
      > by a "super-mod" You have a very curious definition of super-mod. One would assume a super-mod needs to be a mod first. > confirm you know more, but don't want to give out any information People are sometimes entrusted with non-public information they aren’t at liberty to disclose, at least without asking for explicit permission first. Still, when they see false accusations thrown around they sometimes would like to do something. I thought this is a forum for adults, that much should be obvious.
      - ushakov 4y ago
        the definition doesn't matter what matters is that there's a selected group of users, who can leverage capabilities unavailable and unknown to anybody else in the group again, if you won't be disclosing any info, why do you mention that you have anything to disclose?
        Brian_K_White 4y ago
        How many times do they have to hint that the set of people is not limited to users of any stripe. They've said enough, and there simply are situations where that's all you can say, and it's neither pointless nor wrong, nor even unusual or all that remarkable. It's common even.
- dang 4y ago
  Of course commenters can and do criticize any startup here, YC or no. Every regular HN reader knows that. You're not, however, allowed to derail discussion by inundating a thread with angry/obsessive posts and made-up sinister scenarios. That's what you've been doing in multiple threads now, including over 20 comments in this one. That's not curious conversation, which is what HN is supposed to be for. We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). but 'less' does not mean we don't moderate at all. Until now we've moderated your comments much less than we would if you had been behaving this way about any other topic, but enough is enough. Standard HN moderation practice, when users do this kind of thing, is to penalize and rate-limit their account. I'm going to do that now. (Edit: I changed my mind later. See the explanation below.) Since the reaction this will educe is predictable, I might as well answer it now: no, this has nothing to do with criticizing YC or YC startups. It's because you've been posting a plethora of low-quality off-topic comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines. This is standard HN moderation and the only thing different in your case is how long we held off doing it. Actually, IIRC, you're rather a good commenter apart from this, so if you want to fix this, it shouldn't be hard. Edit: For some reason I realized later that I didn't feel good about penalizing your account. It's not that what I said about standard moderation practice was wrong or anything—I just have a feeling that you're a good HN user coming from a good place and that there's probably a much better way to fix this. So I'm going to go with that instinct, and have removed the rate-limit etc.
  - threatofrain 4y ago
    For me, moderating less/more is not as much of an issue as the values by which commentators are being judged by, such as intellectual curiosity, positivity over negativity, or fun — with specific respect to judgments on a YC-backed company on a YC forum (that being said, I'm all for fun-based moderation on technologies or politics in general). I would feel similarly concerned if Twitter or Facebook moderated conversations on their partners or competitors by suggesting that some users weren't intellectually curious enough, or that they had entrenched positions, or that they were full of negativity, or that they weren't "fun" enough. In this perspective, judging a user by the aforementioned values seems to be the wrong tier of values for the stakes at play. I feel that community trust is what is at stake here. Also, you have mentioned before how HN moderation is not secret. Is my account penalized in any way? Given that some users have been hellbanned before, I do feel uncomfortable with the degree of perceived transparency here. As a regular HN reader, it is not my expectation that users shall receive transparency when they are penalized. One of my takeaways from this conversation with the user <ushakov> is that they were initially opaquely penalize, and that we would not have received clarity on this issue had you chosen not to personally respond.
tigrezno 4y ago
terminal app for mac users lol
- wellokpetejr 4y ago
  Why lol?
Bombthecat 4y ago
How do they plan to make money? And why do i need to register with my mail?
sm4rk0 4y ago
Some red flags for me: * needs email to download * needs email to start * spammy email subject with unicode fire in front (lost in HN): " You've been invited to Fig!" * using trackers in email and app * macOS only
- Kye 4y ago
  You associate it with spam because spam uses effective subjects. There are a handful of effective subject forms that are used in essentially every email campaign and transactional email, and a sharp drop off to a long tail of subjects that people ignore.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
Which is weird because if fig is good, it could easily gain adepts, especially here. I'd have nothing against trading my xterm or rxvt for fig if a) fig was better, b fig was was available on Linux and c) fig wasn't collecting data. Meanwhile, after reading comments here, I eventually added fzf completions to my shell and I gotta say: it's quite good!
neya 4y ago
I may sound stupid, but I didn't even realize it was proprietary until it started asking me questions about data collection and too much bombarding on feedback collection. "Why did you uninstall fig". Your comment nailed it and I immediately uninstalled it. This is just to show that even experienced developers like us could be easily misled by companies almost looking like an open source initiative. No offence to the founders - but I am not going to trust access to my entire filesystem by a proprietary software just based off some projected goodwill + marketing. Thank you.
- OrwellianTimes 4y ago
  did the same too. screw you fig, thank you for enlightening me.
- ushakov 4y ago
  they’re only using open-source for their advantage without giving back Fig completions are made by a group of unpaid volunteers and are incompatible with any other completion system Fig pretends to be developing the product collectively in the open, but don’t give any code back to the community of course they’d welcome everyone who wants to be an unpaid volunteer and improve their product in their own time without any expectation of a return https://github.com/withfig/fig/issues/35 https://github.com/withfig/fig/issues/35 is it morally correct to exploit your contributors trust like that?
beckman466 4y ago
> A piece of proprietary software that collects data on basically everything on your machine and is unavailable on Linux? Nice! new slogan: "it's like Grammarly, but for code!" meanwhile, just like Crypto AG, Grammarly (so useful btw to have a program that gives full access to any text-editing a person does, outside of the browser) is a small NSA project. but seriously, the onus is really on these companies to disprove this, and they have been found wanting. yes it does sound like a conspiracy theory... but we know better now thanks to leaks involving Snowden, Crypto AG, etc.
ushakov 4y ago
for context this comment was the first one on the page: https://archive.ph/Cduq2 https://archive.ph/Cduq2
memorable 4y ago
Can you tell me more about the proprietary part?
dang 4y ago
It did rise organically to the front page, at least as far as I can tell from the data. Eventually a moderator marked it as a dupe, since there had been a big thread about the product recently. We did nothing to make it rise. We do that for Launch HNs, a special case described in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but otherwise YC startups are subject to the same community whims that everyone else is. We also don't do any special penalizing of negative posts about YC startups (just the opposite, in fact: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You guys need to understand that while you dislike some things about this product, other HN users find it interesting. That appears to be all that's going on here.

ushakov 4y ago

you are not allowed to criticise Fig here when they appeared here last time, i've written a negative comment about them my comment was then pinned to the bottom of the page by super-mods, even-though it had the first spot with 30 upvotes https://imgur.com/a/Z5AZkik https://imgur.com/a/Z5AZkik dang (HN moderator) has actually confirmed that my comment's ranking was manipulated, but declined to answer any further questions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569

VMtest 4y ago
this opens my eyes, TIL some people on HN have the ability to downweight a comment (which is not equivalent to downvoting)
- ushakov 4y ago
  yes, now you know the game is rigged just imagine how much of the HN comment section is manipulated by these elites i guess some YC-investor isn't happy that us regulars are devaluing his investment and downranks negative comments so that people will give Fig a try after reading bunch of good ones
  - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
    > elites I don't think this is the proper use of the word. These are just people with vested interest in making a product more popular - it has nothing to do with any "elite."
    - ushakov 4y ago
      google: "elites meaning" "a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society." the people who downranked my comments, were indeed elites, because they're a select group of privileged users with the ability to downrank
      - fold_left 4y ago
        Elite like a Janitor? because only he can open the Office in the morning?
        ushakov 4y ago
        the power they have is that they can influence opinions millions visit HackerNews every day when those people see Fig ad here, first thing they do is check what the people are saying about it in the comment section now, imagine that instead of real feedback, you're mostly seeing cherry-picked comments praising the product it certainly shapes your opinion of the product and makes you more likely to try
        Brian_K_White 4y ago
        That makes them merely select, like the janitor. People do commonly use elite as a pejorative stand in for select group, but elite still does mean in some way better or superior, and surely you don't mean to say they are superior in any way than position.
        FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
        no elite like owning the building the janitor have some keys to
  - staindk 4y ago
    Just my 2c I don't know why you are 'a regular' if you have such a toxic opinion of and attitude towards HN. Also although this is not going to sway you, I at least want to mention it as I found it interesting when I came across this - see the response and embedded search link in the FAQ question "Are negative stories about YC suppressed on HN?" here [1] Edit: also want to note that I'm thankful for you and others who bring up the privacy issues because I likely would have looked at the fig.io page, thought 'hey this looks cool' and upvoted the post without thinking much further... which is likely where a lot of the upvotes come from. So IMO putting things more lightly (even in your original response 9 days ago) would have sufficed. Perhaps if you had qualified what you meant by fig relying on "free labour" (it just sounds like a hectic accusation) your comment would have stayed at the top. Though overall I agree it doesn't seem like the kind of comment that should have been suppressed and it's good to push back against that a bit. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
    - emerongi 4y ago
      I think I would very much be dissatisfied as well after finding out that someone can arbitrarily devalue my opinions. The original comment by the author wasn't even that negative in my opinion, it just outlined real problems with Fig. Someone didn't like that though and the author got the hammer for it.
      - theturtletalks 4y ago
        This is the disconnect. HN wants to come across as a discussion of free ideas that can be voted upon, but some users can down-weight comments to the bottom? That’s well within HN’s prerogative since it was started by YC, but they should be straight forward that YC companies are given preferential treatment. Most lurkers and users think YC companies make it to the front page organically and based on merit alone.
        dang 4y ago
        YC companies are not given preferential treatment, with three exceptions, which are clearly defined in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html): Launch HN posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches https://news.ycombinator.com/launches), job ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs), and alumni usernames being displayed in orange to other alumni. Other than that, YC companies have to compete for attention on HN along with everyone else, and I can tell you that most find it maddeningly difficult. In some ways we use moderation power to YC startups' disadvantage - we moderate criticisms of YC startups less, not more, than usual (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). For example, the tedious angry-generic-repetitive sort of subthread that tends to get upvoted on most common topics is exactly the kind of thing we downweight as part of standard moderation, but we do that less when a YC startup is the topic. That's not because such discussion is any higher-quality in those cases (it isn't), but rather because people are quick to jump to the conclusion that we're doing nefarious things and we need to be able to answer those concerns in good conscience. The fact that there's all this drama about one such subthread having gotten downweighted is actually an indication of how we don't do that. It happened, but only by mistake.
- dang 4y ago
  We've been doing experiments for many years with the intention of extending moderation abilities to broader segments of the community. Some of these experiments end up getting dropped, while others end up as official features on the site. For example, it used to be that only moderators could unkill a [dead] post and restore it to full visibility. Then we started an experiment in letting non-moderators do that, and this turned into the 'vouch' feature which allows most HN users above a certain karma threshold to have a say in which posts get unkilled. That was the biggest success to date - it has made a big difference both in thread quality (many interesting comments become visible) and community happiness (there's less resentment about posts being dead than there used to be). That was a great outcome, and we're always thinking about more possibilities for such things. The current experiment is very much in the same spirit. Personally I would love to find ways to extend these things to everyone (most likely above a certain karma threshold) but it's not often obvious how to do that. Another example is the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which gives submissions a random placement on HN's front page.
dewey 4y ago
> confirmed that my comment's ranking was manipulated Being flagged / downvoted by users isn't "manipulated", that's just how a upvote / downvote based website works. The comment was likely downvoted because it was just plain out wrong as the first comment to your post already says. > YC companies get tips and notifications when they're about to get featured > We don't.
- ushakov 4y ago
  no, no, no you're missing the point! the comment wasn't flagged and it wasn't downvoted in fact the opposite is true as it has 30 upvotes, upvoted by regular users like you the comment was downranked, so it only appears lower on the page this feature isn't available for regular users, only for an elite group
  - dewey 4y ago
    > you're missing the point! No, the point is that it was downvoted / downranked / flagged because it was a low quality comment that is spreading FUD and it doesn't matter who did it.
    - ushakov 4y ago
      if my comment was so low quality, why did 30 users choose to upvote it? why isn't HN respecting user's opinions and manipulating the positions as they wish?
      - ascar 4y ago
        > why isn't HN respecting user's opinions and manipulating the positions as they wish? Because certain comments can be quite agreeable, but don't encourage interesting discussions. Your particular thread had more discussion about bitterness and etiquette than content. Even though your points are valid that's not the kind of discussion one wants to have at the top of any article. Derailing the comment section about this article with your own agenda isn't particularly helpful either. But at least I appreciate that I now know about that feature.
monkin 4y ago
All your comments in that thread are negative. I just see an angry and hostile person who’s rocking a boat on a sea of conspiracy. As Dang said in comment you linked: “That's no fun and does nothing for the community.”.
- ushakov 4y ago
  i'm not denying that i was in angry mood when commenting in the thread but the reason i've got angry is because the original comment i made was moved to the very last position not by downvoting, but by undemocratic rulers of HN the angry comments in thread came after that accident happened
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    I think it’s very explicit that HN never intends to be a democracy, and one of the techniques it uses is fairly strong moderation.
    - spoils19 4y ago
      So the community espouses the free market of ideas, yet we're supposed to love it's strong moderation?
      - Kye 4y ago
        The community is made up of people from all walks of life from everywhere on the planet. It's impossible to speak of it in general terms. No, not everyone wants an ideological free-for-all.
        eleet_hacker 4y ago
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      How does that make it ok? Mods moderate, ...and their moderation action caused this flood of negative reaction which wouldn't have been their otherwise. If it's valid to criticise a critic, it must also be valid to criticise a critic critic. The merits of a given argument or action do not rest on "because daddy said so". There is and must be a daddy, but no daddy is above critique themselves even though their job is to moderate others.
mrtksn 4y ago
I too, sometimes get into personal fights and push for emotional arguments but nothing good ever comes out of this. I have my HN account downgraded multiple times. Here on HN, we have something absent everywhere else: A moderator who treats you as a person and spends time and energy to explain why something is the way it is. You may not agree with the reasoning all the times but almost everywhere else you don't get the reasoning and only the results(shadow ban, censorship, lock out). Can I offer you something? If you believe that HN is not run fairly, collect the evidence and write a thorough article about it and post it here or on Reddit and other places. If you articulate your ideas properly and if you have a point I bet you will receive traction and response from YC people.
- ushakov 4y ago
  what's the point? YC owns HackerNews HN is their marketing asset otherwise how is it possible that a niche product of a YC company right now has the first spot with 400 upvotes?
  - chrischen 4y ago
    How does one even disprove your statement? If indeed it organically got upvoted how does one even prove that to you? Your argument against them is posited in way that is impossible to counter. I for one upvoted because this genuinely seemed like an interesting feature. It's clearly hitting a pain point for me as a developer, whether or not it actually ends up solving it satisfactorily.
    - ushakov 4y ago
      - oefrha 4y ago
        Now that’s just crossing the line.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
sras-me 4y ago
Reminds me of the following expression. "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." The problem appear to be people have a high expectation from HN. People think that HN to be a discussion platform. But it is actually a PR platform implemented via a discussion forum. Understand that and you ll have no trouble.
oefrha 4y ago
I’m not affiliated with YC in any way, I sometimes mock YC companies, and I can tell you with certainty that a comment can be downranked out of human discretion to the bottom without the involvement of a “super-mod” or anyone affiliated with YC. Not sure if I can disclose further than that. Also, I tried fig the first time round and was not impressed.
- ushakov 4y ago
  the comment was explicitly downranked by a "super-mod", not downvoted by regular users > Not sure if I can disclose further than that. how hypocrite of you to confirm you know more, but don't want to give out any information why are you confirming then?
  - oefrha 4y ago
    > by a "super-mod" You have a very curious definition of super-mod. One would assume a super-mod needs to be a mod first. > confirm you know more, but don't want to give out any information People are sometimes entrusted with non-public information they aren’t at liberty to disclose, at least without asking for explicit permission first. Still, when they see false accusations thrown around they sometimes would like to do something. I thought this is a forum for adults, that much should be obvious.
    - ushakov 4y ago
      the definition doesn't matter what matters is that there's a selected group of users, who can leverage capabilities unavailable and unknown to anybody else in the group again, if you won't be disclosing any info, why do you mention that you have anything to disclose?
      - Brian_K_White 4y ago
        How many times do they have to hint that the set of people is not limited to users of any stripe. They've said enough, and there simply are situations where that's all you can say, and it's neither pointless nor wrong, nor even unusual or all that remarkable. It's common even.
dang 4y ago
Of course commenters can and do criticize any startup here, YC or no. Every regular HN reader knows that. You're not, however, allowed to derail discussion by inundating a thread with angry/obsessive posts and made-up sinister scenarios. That's what you've been doing in multiple threads now, including over 20 comments in this one. That's not curious conversation, which is what HN is supposed to be for. We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). but 'less' does not mean we don't moderate at all. Until now we've moderated your comments much less than we would if you had been behaving this way about any other topic, but enough is enough. Standard HN moderation practice, when users do this kind of thing, is to penalize and rate-limit their account. I'm going to do that now. (Edit: I changed my mind later. See the explanation below.) Since the reaction this will educe is predictable, I might as well answer it now: no, this has nothing to do with criticizing YC or YC startups. It's because you've been posting a plethora of low-quality off-topic comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines. This is standard HN moderation and the only thing different in your case is how long we held off doing it. Actually, IIRC, you're rather a good commenter apart from this, so if you want to fix this, it shouldn't be hard. Edit: For some reason I realized later that I didn't feel good about penalizing your account. It's not that what I said about standard moderation practice was wrong or anything—I just have a feeling that you're a good HN user coming from a good place and that there's probably a much better way to fix this. So I'm going to go with that instinct, and have removed the rate-limit etc.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  For me, moderating less/more is not as much of an issue as the values by which commentators are being judged by, such as intellectual curiosity, positivity over negativity, or fun — with specific respect to judgments on a YC-backed company on a YC forum (that being said, I'm all for fun-based moderation on technologies or politics in general). I would feel similarly concerned if Twitter or Facebook moderated conversations on their partners or competitors by suggesting that some users weren't intellectually curious enough, or that they had entrenched positions, or that they were full of negativity, or that they weren't "fun" enough. In this perspective, judging a user by the aforementioned values seems to be the wrong tier of values for the stakes at play. I feel that community trust is what is at stake here. Also, you have mentioned before how HN moderation is not secret. Is my account penalized in any way? Given that some users have been hellbanned before, I do feel uncomfortable with the degree of perceived transparency here. As a regular HN reader, it is not my expectation that users shall receive transparency when they are penalized. One of my takeaways from this conversation with the user <ushakov> is that they were initially opaquely penalize, and that we would not have received clarity on this issue had you chosen not to personally respond.

tigrezno 4y ago

terminal app for mac users lol

wellokpetejr 4y ago
Why lol?

Bombthecat 4y ago

How do they plan to make money? And why do i need to register with my mail?

sm4rk0 4y ago

Some red flags for me: * needs email to download * needs email to start * spammy email subject with unicode fire in front (lost in HN): " You've been invited to Fig!" * using trackers in email and app * macOS only

Kye 4y ago
You associate it with spam because spam uses effective subjects. There are a handful of effective subject forms that are used in essentially every email campaign and transactional email, and a sharp drop off to a long tail of subjects that people ignore.

TacticalCoder 4y ago

Which is weird because if fig is good, it could easily gain adepts, especially here. I'd have nothing against trading my xterm or rxvt for fig if a) fig was better, b fig was was available on Linux and c) fig wasn't collecting data. Meanwhile, after reading comments here, I eventually added fzf completions to my shell and I gotta say: it's quite good!

neya 4y ago

I may sound stupid, but I didn't even realize it was proprietary until it started asking me questions about data collection and too much bombarding on feedback collection. "Why did you uninstall fig". Your comment nailed it and I immediately uninstalled it. This is just to show that even experienced developers like us could be easily misled by companies almost looking like an open source initiative. No offence to the founders - but I am not going to trust access to my entire filesystem by a proprietary software just based off some projected goodwill + marketing. Thank you.

OrwellianTimes 4y ago
did the same too. screw you fig, thank you for enlightening me.
ushakov 4y ago
they’re only using open-source for their advantage without giving back Fig completions are made by a group of unpaid volunteers and are incompatible with any other completion system Fig pretends to be developing the product collectively in the open, but don’t give any code back to the community of course they’d welcome everyone who wants to be an unpaid volunteer and improve their product in their own time without any expectation of a return https://github.com/withfig/fig/issues/35 https://github.com/withfig/fig/issues/35 is it morally correct to exploit your contributors trust like that?

beckman466 4y ago

> A piece of proprietary software that collects data on basically everything on your machine and is unavailable on Linux? Nice! new slogan: "it's like Grammarly, but for code!" meanwhile, just like Crypto AG, Grammarly (so useful btw to have a program that gives full access to any text-editing a person does, outside of the browser) is a small NSA project. but seriously, the onus is really on these companies to disprove this, and they have been found wanting. yes it does sound like a conspiracy theory... but we know better now thanks to leaks involving Snowden, Crypto AG, etc.

ushakov 4y ago

for context this comment was the first one on the page: https://archive.ph/Cduq2 https://archive.ph/Cduq2

memorable 4y ago

Can you tell me more about the proprietary part?

dang 4y ago

It did rise organically to the front page, at least as far as I can tell from the data. Eventually a moderator marked it as a dupe, since there had been a big thread about the product recently. We did nothing to make it rise. We do that for Launch HNs, a special case described in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but otherwise YC startups are subject to the same community whims that everyone else is. We also don't do any special penalizing of negative posts about YC startups (just the opposite, in fact: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You guys need to understand that while you dislike some things about this product, other HN users find it interesting. That appears to be all that's going on here.